Colony Survival News

In the previous blog, we talked about an improved lighting system. We’re close to releasing it publicly, but we love to do a test first! We’re curious about the results in different worlds, the performance on different hardware and your opinion about it.

The differences aren’t extremely obvious when just roaming the outside world, but it does really affect interiors, and it’s especially noticeable in underground conditions. Tunnels that are far from sunlight are actually dark.

If you want to try the beta, go to your Steam Library, right-click Colony Survival and go to “properties”. In the “betas” tab, enter the access code sendfeedbackplease. This will unlock the beta-light branch. Enable it and your game will be automatically updated with the new lighting! It should not pose a risk to old savegames. You might encounter some buggy edge cases though.

As the access code suggests: please send feedback! Join our Discord and share your feedback in #general or put your screenshot in #screenshots. Feel free to leave a comment on this blog too.

Veel plezier met de beta!

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The release of 0.11 was a big success! Player counts regularly peaked above 300 simultaneous players, and our recent review rate rose to 98% positive. Thanks to everybody for the support!

We released a couple of small patches, fixing some minor issues and improving some models a bit. We also updated the Steam Storepage. All screenshots were multiple years old, and none featured the new colonist models. We uploaded a bunch of new ones to rectify that situation.

We’re already hard at work on the next big update. The lighting in Colony Survival has been fairly primitive. Sun lighting was harshly divided between “direct” and “ambient”. Of course, in real life, sun shadows have a much more complicated gradient.

Visualizing the new lightmaps

So Zun is working on a system that dynamically renders lightmaps. He has added an Ambient Occlusion system that uses raytracing to make corners and crevices appear darker. And he has built a system that knows which areas have direct sunlight overhead. The floodfill system that was already used for lighting from torches and such, now applies to that as well, to make the sunlight spread around more natural.

All of this helps to make the lighting more beautiful, more realistic and more practical. It’s still a bit wonky in certain edge cases, like when it has to deal with water, so it’s not completely ready for release yet. But it will go public in the next big update!


Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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Update 0.11 is now available on Steam! The most visible change is a total replacement of all the colonist models. In the past, we only had one colonist model. It used UV-mapped textures, and they were difficult to change for us. The only thing that varied between colonists was the color of their shirts.

The new vertex coloured model is much easier to adjust for us, and the differences between colonists are much bigger now. A lot of colonists have relevant tools and bags attached to their belts. There is a wide variety of hats and helmets. Shirts, pants, shoes, the belt itself, the wristband - all of these appear in many different colors. Some colonists are more muscular, others less. Some have rolled up sleeves, others don’t. Some wear wrist guards, others wear gaiters.

We are very happy with the results and hope you can appreciate them as well! Let us know about your most and least favorites, and share your ideas to improve the look of current and future models.


To make the colonists even more unique, we’ve decided to add individual names to the colonists. When you recruit a small group of colonists simultaneously, there’s a large chance that they share the same surname.

Names are only visible while you wield the command tool. Click on a colonist with the command tool and a new menu will appear. Here, you can generate a new random name for your colonist, or you can edit it manually. You can also see which job they’re doing, and visualize where they are traveling.



But that’s not all! Construction areas received some improvements. They’ve become much more customizable. Want to build just walls? That’s possible. Want to build cylindrical walls? No problem. Want to dig out a huge round hole? You can do it all in 0.11!

Apart from the shape of the area, there are now 4 different construction assignments you can give to your colonists:

1. Remove All - remove all blocks in an area
   
2. Build All - fill the area with a specific block type
   
3. Remove Specific - remove a specific type from the area
   
4. Replace Specific - replace one type of block with another

We can’t wait to see what you’ll build with these new options!


Some final changes: over time, grass blocks will spread their grass to neighbouring dirt blocks. And previously, saplings placed by the player would always grow into the same tiny, basic tree. In 0.11, these saplings will be able to grow into the tree shapes you saw in “nature”.

Let us know about your experiences with 0.11 in the comments or on our Discord!

Veel plezier met de update :D

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The current colonist model was already in the game over eight years ago, in early 2016. The workflow for producing it was horrible. The model has a bunch of surfaces that connect and disconnect in many different spots. To texture them, the model has to be “unwrapped” into a flat image that displays all these surfaces next to each other. But getting a feel for how the textures look on a 3D model from a flat image is very difficult.

When it looked semi-decent, I didn’t want to touch it anymore. The only difference between the colonists is currently the color of their shirt, which we can very easily adjust by putting a simple color code in a .JSON file.

When we added new monsters in 0.9.0, we used a different method to craft the models. Instead of texturing the model in a more traditional way, we made slightly more detailed 3D models and used vertex painting to color them. We had used the same method to generate for example the beds and torches at the very beginning of Colony Survival development, and later on we used it for jobblocks as well. We’re very happy with the results there.

Farmer / tinkerer / beekeeper

I had used it to make a new vertex-painted colonist model before the release of 0.9.0, but Zun never got around to implementing it. It was also a bit “flat”, undetailed and boring. In recent weeks, Zun did put it in an internal development build, and I gave it a bit more life and detail. We like the results a lot and are near-certain of adding this to the main branch.

Instead of merely having a different-coloured shirt for every job, it has now become possible to make much more custom designs for different jobs. I can quickly adjust how muscular colonists are, the color of not only their shirts but also of pants, shoes, bracelets and belts, I can roll shirt sleeves up or down, I can add tools to their belts or hats to their heads. I’ve been making a bunch of new models for different jobs and we believe it’s a big improvement!

[h3]Names and miscellaneous[/h3]

That’s not all we’ve been working on. To make colonists feel even more personal, we’ve decided to generate names for them. We made a long list of first names and surnames and each colonist gets a random combination of them. Colonists recruited in quick succession of each other have a high chance of sharing the same surname. In our internal development build, they are only visible while wielding the command tool. Making sure they’re not blocked by headgear or crafting icons, and that they’re not floating in the middle of nowhere either, is a bit of a problem that we’re still working on.

Named colonists

Another change concerns the saplings. Saplings placed by players would always grow into the same very small tree. In the next big update, saplings will be able to grow into larger, more diverse and more natural shapes, like the trees that are in the world when you first launch the game.

Also, builders will be able to use a couple of extra items like roofs and rails, and crafting limits will become a bit more flexible. In the current live build, the number of the limit has to be a multiple of the amount of items produced in one recipe. So if a recipe results in 3 arrows, it has to be 3/6/9/etc. That will no longer be the case with the next release.

We hope you’ll enjoy these changes as much as we do! Let us know how you feel about the new colonists and names, and feel free to share your ideas for specific jobs in the comments or on Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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After six years, Colony Survival finally has a new main trailer! Here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbbDsOB_3zQ

Making it was quite the challenge. We really wanted to showcase the potential of the game. We needed beautiful worlds that integrated all the new content from 0.10.0, stuff like the enhanced rail system and all the new decorative items. We asked for help from the community with the Builder’s Contest - here are the winners!

Although their worlds are impressive and beautiful, they didn’t showcase all the things that we thought a main trailer should contain. So we spent weeks building a custom world exactly suited to filming the trailer.

Then we filmed it. For the first time, the entire pipeline is 4K. 4K rendering of the game, 4K recording, 4K editing. The difference with older videos is very noticeable!

Last but not least, we needed a proper trailer song. One that will really “grab” newcomers who visit our storepage for the first time and know nothing about Colony Survival. Eventually, we found The Mad King by Rok Nardin, a young Slovenian composer. We got in touch with him and licensed the song for our trailer. We are very excited about the end result. Thanks again to everybody who helped make it possible!


We set another major step since the last Friday Blog. We now have full controller support and Steam Deck compatibility!

This is actually a thing that is checked by the team behind Steam. You have to put in a request for them to look at your game, and then they’ll actually play it and test a bunch of different features.

We didn’t get fully approved on the first try. We received some feedback about things that we needed to improve. We did, and this week we did get the full approval!

This is a feature that has been popularly demanded since the release. If you’ve been waiting to try and play Colony Survival with a controller or on your Steam Deck, then this is the moment!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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